About the Work

I had the good fortune in the Autumn of 2010 to be invited to visit American friends in their early 19th century farmhouse in Virginia.

After the flight over the Atlantic, I wanted to stretch my legs, so they took me on a tour of their house's grounds. We arrived at a tree with a scattering of small, rough stones underneath. I would not have noticed them at all had they not pointed them out.

Each was the gravestone of a slave and although they appeared insignificant enough to have been inadvertently kicked aside, these unnamed markers of people's lives had remained undisturbed since they were first laid.

The light was fading and the only camera I had was the rough-and-ready one on my cellphone. But that was right for the subject.

Details

Size and Material

Location

Tags

About Vaughan Grylls

Born 10th December 1943 in Newark, Nottinghamshire and attended art schools at Nottingham, Wolverhampton, Goldsmiths' and the Slade. He has taught at several art schools in the UK and the US.

From 1996 to 2005 he was Director of the Kent Institute of Art and Design. In 2005 he resigned to concentrate full-time on his own work after joining the Kent and the Surrey Institutes of Art and Design to make the University for the Creative Arts.

″I still use the same approach to my work: I get an idea, think of the title and then make the work. So not much has changed since 1964″